Writing about the food, farmers, fishermen, and folk of Long Island's North Fork.

September 2016

09/26/2016

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Julia Weisenberg taking a break in the middle of her workday. She no longer wears business suits or reports to a Manhattan office.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 22, 2016

When Julia Weisenberg was an elementary school student on Shelter Island in the mid-1980s, her father, Bill Romanchuk, was an effective voice in the local movement that helped shut down operations at the newly constructed Shoreham nuclear power plant.

LILCO, a precursor of LIPA and PSEG, had built the facility on Long Island Sound near Riverhead. Many feared if it malfunctioned — as other nuclear power plants had — it would be impossible to evacuate the East End. Julia remembers being proud to stand next to her father at a rally.

“I thought, O.K., now my dad is going to give them hell,” she said. “He did not back down. He was a leader.”

Julia’s parents, Bill and Regina Romanchuk are gone now, but Julia said their example guides her every day and was an important factor in her 2015 decision to leave corporate life as an executive with Sorenson Communications and support her young family as a fitness coach, and most importantly, move back to the Island and live in the house where she grew up.

Born in Bellerose, Queens, Julia and her parents moved to Silver Beach when she was an infant. She remembers a rich and adventurous childhood, with daily, year-round visits to the beach near her home, exploring the airfield at Westmoreland Farm, making impressions of animal footprints, dissecting owl pellets and playing house in an area near Klenawicus Field that used to be strewn with discarded dishwashers and kitchen cabinets.

Julia has two sisters from her father’s first marriage; Lynn, who lives in South Carolina and Lori, who lives in Manhattan. Her youngest sister died as an infant of sudden infant death syndrome and her older sister Corinne, who lived on the Island, died at 29. Julia graduated in 1992 from Shelter Island High School.

In elementary school, she had a stutter that made it difficult to use the telephone, order in a restaurant, or participate in classroom discussions. Speech therapy helped her with her disability, but she kept the feeling of being vulnerable. The determination to have alternate ways of communicating motivated her to learn American Sign Language (ASL) in her teens.

At first, she said, she used ASL to communicate with the deaf parents of a high school boyfriend, but eventually her interest led her to become an interpreter, a skill she used to put herself through college.

In 1997, Julia was 24, studying at Stony Brook University and working as an interpreter, when she was called in to help with a special situation. Sixty-two deaf and mute Mexican immigrants had been discovered living in slavery in Queens and investigators needed sign language interpreters who could also understand Spanish to communicate with the victims.

The experiences related by the victims were horrific, and Julia’s work helped get them back to their lives and families.

From 1994 until 2011, she was at Stony Brook, where she finished her B.A., got an M.A. in teaching English as a Second Language, conducted research in sign language and was awarded a Ph.D. in Linguistics. She was then hired as a professor and taught ASL until moving to Manhattan to take a job at Sorenson Communications, a telecommunications company that provides telephone services for the deaf using interpreters. Julia became the manager of the company’s largest call center in Manhattan.

In 2008 she was in Moscow working as an interpreter for a group of deaf visitors, when she met Dmitri Kolmogorov, the liaison for the Russian side who was also deaf. Julia remembered it was raining. “He put up the umbrella and gave me his arm. I thought this is the kind of thing my father would do, this old world gentlemanliness,” she said. “I thought ‘I’m going to marry this man.’”

During their courtship, she flew to Russia and Dmitri flew to see her in the U.S. until they decided they were a couple and he moved to New York. Today he works as a life coach for deaf clients, helping them get interviews and practice job skills. Julia’s oldest daughter Anne, 14, by a previous marriage, goes to school on Long Island, and her daughters, Daria, 12 and Regina, 5 attend the Shelter Island School.

When Hurricane Sandy flooded lower Manhattan in 2012, the offices of Sorenson Communications at 99 Wall Street were destroyed. With call volume spiking, and the equipment destroyed, Julia had to send local employees — some of whom had lost their homes in the storm — to other Sorenson call centers across the country. Meanwhile, she had evacuated her ailing mother from Shelter Island to her New York apartment to ride out the storm in safety, and her kids were out of school.

“I had to remain calm,” she said. It took eight months to find a new office and reestablish the call center in Manhattan. In the interim, Julia had to run the center from her laptop with interpreters at remote locations.

She now teaches “PiYo,” a kind of high-intensity, low-impact workout. She runs virtual groups and provides support to individual clients using Facetime, Zoom and a PiYo app. She also teaches group PiYo classes in person on Shelter Island, in Greenport and to local private clients. She welcomes deaf students in her live and virtual classes. She said. “I tend to have clients who are parents and work full time, and I have to be available to them all the time.”

Julia’s local PiYo classes are partially funded by the town and offered twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday from 6 to 7 p.m. throughout the winter for $5 per person, per class.

Like most Islanders, Julia has noticed the increase in summertime tourism here over the years. “I know sometimes people say tourists don’t care for it the way we do,” she said. “But the people I meet seem grateful to visit here. If my father had not felt comfortable when he came here on vacation, he might not have bought the property.”

Julia’s closet is a reminder of the change she made in her life a couple of years back, with neatly hanging business suits now unused taking up half the space, and the other half stuffed with workout clothes.

“My childhood was so wonderful, that I felt it calling me back here. I step out in my back lawn on Silver Beach and I feel so peaceful,” she said. “I can feel my parents everywhere. They instilled in me good values and I’m trying to grow those bigger and better.”

09/22/2016

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 15, and the Suffolk-Times and Riverhead Review on September 22, 2016

This election year has been strange and unsettling and not just because some members of my family are considering self-deportation in the event of a Republican victory.

I got a call the other day from my mother, now in her 80s with the sad news that her beloved beagle has died. His name was Trump.

My mother brought the dog home to her Reno, Nevada apartment in 2003 and named him Trump after my father’s childhood beagle. My father had died a couple of years before, and since my parents had both been only children, it seemed fitting that before and after they had each other, they each had a hound companion named Trump.

For the past year it seemed whenever my mother took her dog for a walk a passerby would discover the dog had the same name as the guy running for president. It often launched an exchange my mother preferred to avoid — did you name him after Trump to honor the candidate or to ridicule him?

Trump the beagle and Trump the man did have a few things in common. Both Trumps have done a lot of barking.

Like the politician, beagle Trump could be pugilistic. For example, there was the case of the man out for an evening stroll whose pants were torn after an encounter with my mother’s dog. There were witnesses, some of whom say Trump tried to bite the man and missed. Others said pants just tear sometimes. Who knows how?

Beagle Trump lived his entire life in a casino town and if there was ever a high roller of the canine world, he was it. A beautiful tricolor hound with plenty of ear leather and soulful brown eyes, Trump was a dashing canine sidekick and a fitting companion for my mother, a competitive bridge player with masterpoints and an active social life.

In his youth Trump was an escape artist, once fleeing from a woman hired to walk him. Thank goodness the dog-walker saw a flash of hound moving quickly away and had the wit to flag down a Reno police cruiser and persuade the officer to make chase. Trump came home in a squad car. From then on, when Trump went missing my mother started her search by looking out the window to see if a police car was out front preparing to discharge the fugitive.

Like Donald Trump, beagle Trump grew up in a household with caviar tastes. Stolen sturgeon roe was his favorite. A moment’s inattention, and Trump was scarfing down the black pearls as my mother’s martini sloshed on the table, swaying with the seismic undulations of Trump’s enthusiasm. Eventually she learned not to leave her caviar unattended when she went to answer the phone.

Like the presidential candidate, our Trump was the cause of a schism that separated people into warring camps. At the Christmas dinner of 2015, beagle Trump climbed onto the kitchen table and consumed an entire pan of cornbread stuffing while the family was gathering in the dining room hoping to eat it themselves. The theft was discovered when one of my nieces spotted him standing on the table near the empty pan. The family cleaved into those who admired the athletic ability of the old dog and his enthusiasm for good food, and those who saw the act as the ruination of Christmas and a total breakdown of civilization.

Candidate Trump never turns away from his most controversial positions, another trait that he and beagle Trump shared. Unlike most dogs, Trump went forward and back but never to the side. For example, when he decided he was finished sniffing behind the garbage cans and wanted to exit the garage, he walked out backwards.

In November, our country will vote on the question of whether to make Donald Trump president, or send him back to his boardrooms and penthouses, but Trump the beagle won’t be around to express his opinion. That good boy heard enough unseemly politicking and endured enough Trump jokes in the past year to kill anybody.

09/21/2016

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTOStan Church at his Ram Island home overlooking the spot where he first dropped anchor in 1979.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 15, 2016.

When Stan Church was in his early 30s, he was already the founder and owner of one of the top marketing agencies in New York. But when he wasn’t pitching clients or coming up with innovative ways to reinvigorate a brand like the Pillsbury doughboy, he was sailing.

Stan decided to see if he could get a captain’s license. He took the exams and qualified for a 50-ton license, and five years later, when he renewed it, he said they gave him a 100-ton license — sufficient to run a North Ferry boat — because of the time he had spent crewing for a very large yacht.

For 20 years, Stan’s father was mayor of New Rochelle, the place where Stan was born in 1941 and grew up with sisters Jacqueline and Rochelle. His parents divorced, there was a custody battle, and Stan stayed with his father.

“We had lots of privileges — housekeeper, nanny, a driver to take me to school,” he said.

When Stan was old enough to insist, he moved to St. James with his mother, where the lifestyle wasn’t as fancy. “I worked every afternoon, made $60 a week and gave my Mom $30,” he said. “I went down to Stony Brook Harbor and went clamming, and was just a kid again.”

His father wanted him to attend West Point, but Stan already knew he wanted to work in a creative field and rejected the idea.

Instead, he went to the Parson’s School of Design and took a job in 1963 with the venerable advertising agency BBDO, helping to pitch accounts, and rising quickly to the position of art director.

“I am competitive and ambitious and I worked weekends and nights,” Stan said.

He left BBDO in 1966 to start his own agency, and when he merged with a more established firm in 1975, the new company became Wallace Church. Three years later, he began teaching part-time at Parsons, which he did for many years, becoming a mentor to students who went on to work at his and other creative agencies.

Today he is the sole owner of Wallace Church & Co., where over the years he’s worked with iconic brands such as Heinz, Ciao Bella, Pillsbury, Revlon and Nestlé. He’s the recipient of many design awards and was named an American Institute of Graphic Arts Fellow in January 2010.

The 2008 recession was a challenge to Stan’s business. Longtime clients held back on work and the business had to “re-scale.”

He was able to accomplish this reduction, he said, through attrition as other companies came after his employees.

“A lot of the talent in my office went elsewhere in the industry,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me because I helped them get there.”Stan’s first job after graduation from Parsons was as a cook on a large yacht, visiting harbors up and down the East Coast. “I had seen a lot, but in 1979 when I pulled into Coecles Harbor, I thought it was the best place I’d ever seen,” he said. “And it was driving distance from the city.”

Stan’s first home on Shelter Island was a boat. As soon as he arrived in Coecles Harbor, he got a bite to eat at the Ram’s Head, and went directly to arrange a mooring.

Later he purchased a 41-foot sailboat to keep at the mooring, and lived in it for several years before buying a cottage in Westmoreland in 1983. A decade later, Stan designed and built his current home on Big Ram Island, looking out at the same part of the Island he fell for in 1979.

Stan has been married to his wife Kristin for 15 years; his two previous marriages ended in divorce. Kristin is director of marketing for Mandarin Oriental Hotels and the mother of the youngest of Stan’s four children, Madison. An accomplished equestrienne at 14, Madison rides at Hampshire Farms and has won two ribbons at the Hampton Classic, including the top prize in 2015.

Nothing says more about what is important in Stan’s life than the prominent role his children play in it, his company, and his plans for the future, he said. His oldest child, Wendy, has worked with him at Wallace Church & Co. for many years, and will soon become a partner in the company.

His daughter Robin is in her 40s. An interior designer, she lives in Tampa. His 30-year-old son, Justin, lives in Portland, Oregon. Stan, Robin and Justin are contemplating a venture together to design and build homes on Shelter Island.

“Shelter Island is a fairy tale and it’s nice to be in that story,” Stan said. They would design homes “with a European flavor; quality homes, something precious.”

Stan does not think Shelter Island is overrun with development. “Sunset [Beach] is a novelty because it is a crazy place and the beach is like the Riviera,” he said. “People here are not so into themselves. It’s more comfortable here.”

In 2012 Stan and Justin rode out Superstorm Sandy in their Ram Island house, a memorable experience for both men. Looking out into the storm to where his dock should have been, Stan said all he could see was whitecaps. During the storm, he and Justin heard banging and saw that a large propane tank had floated up to a neighbor’s house and was battering the kitchen door, propelled by waves of water.

“We got a line on it and dragged it into the woods,” Stan said. With a gas stove and a source of water, he didn’t consider evacuating the home he loves. “I knew I had whatever I needed,” he said.

Stan Church,Lightning round

What do you always have with you?

A pocket full of pennies. I used to think if you found a penny heads-up it was good luck. Things were going so well I didn’t want to give any of them up.

Favorite place on Shelter Island?

My home. I look up in the sky and thank God to be so lucky.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island?

The British Virgin Islands, Jost Van Dyke.

Last time you were elated?

When Justin was born.

What exasperates you?

When I know for sure something is right and my clients just don’t want to go that way.

Last time you were afraid?

I was in a 40-foot boat in 30-foot waves, dark of night, and although there were seven aboard, only two of us could sail the boat.

Best day of the year on Shelter Island?

Christmas morning. Everyone is sharing and giving and happy and the kids are there.

Favorite book?

When I was a kid I was fascinated with the Sears Roebuck catalog; farmers equipment, clothes for foul weather, hammocks of all kinds, tools.

Favorite food?

Gelato

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family?

Milton Glaser, the graphic artist. He’s the most gifted person I know.

09/19/2016

It was a sunny Friday afternoon in August, and although Dr. Nathanael Desire’s office hours at the Shelter Island Medical Center were over, he was still there.

Seated in the waiting room, Dr. Desire was telling me about his life, his work, and how the past three years as one of Shelter Island’s family doctors have strengthened his ties to the community. Suddenly, a very small member of that community appeared at the office door in his mother’s arms. He was having difficulty breathing.

Dr. Desire stopped talking in mid-sentence — my question was “How do you handle a crisis?” — listened carefully as the mother of the coughing child explained the situation, and guided them both to an examining room, saying, “Hey, big fellow. I’m Dr. Desire. How you doing?”

The doctor was in.

Dr. Desire was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where he grew up speaking mostly Creole at home, and reading French at school. He was almost 10 years old when his family moved to Brooklyn, where he went to the elementary school around the corner and ran home to watch Spiderman on TV. Today his English is a perfect testament to his ear for language, and the educational value of Spiderman.

His was a large family with two brothers, and four sisters. He attended John Dewey High School, went on to major in finance and investment at Baruch College, and went to work as a banker. But his real love was science, not business and he longed for a more caring profession. He left his job in banking and three weeks later was studying gross anatomy in medical school.

Dr. Desire met his future wife, Anthonette Banks, through his sisters. They were all friends, and the families also knew each other through the Seventh-day Adventist Church, an important institution in their lives.

The couple started dating when Anthonette decided to go to college in Massachusetts at Mount Holyoke. Nathanael was living at home, working at the bank, and began driving to Massachusetts on weekends to see her.

They married in 1996 in a three-week gap between the second and third year of medical school, “a little secret within the medical profession,” Dr. Desire said. “Around the break a lot of us got married.”

In 1998, he received his degree from the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine, Old Westbury, and did his internship in internal medicine and pediatrics at Stony Brook, qualifying him to take patients of any age. He established a private practice in Bellport, and the Desire family still lives in Coram.

In addition to his extensive training in medical school, Dr. Desire has additional training in conducting the specialized immigration physicals required of people applying for a green card. He also does physicals for special commercial licenses, such as truck drivers, firefighters and other physicals with unique requirements.

“Not every physician does it,” he said. “People come to me from around the East End for these physicals.”

When Dr. Desire first came to Shelter Island, he was on his way from his Bellport practice to the San Simeon nursing home in Greenport. “It was winter, and I liked that I could drive from one end to the other and not much was happening,” he said. “So when I saw there was an Island Medical Center, I stopped in and introduced myself to Dr. Kelt.”

Dr. Desire and Dr. Ann (as she prefers to be called) have two children, 8-year-old Natalie, and 4-year-old Nolan. “A delight,” he said. “They are keeping us young.”

Nolan is left-handed in a family of righties, and Dr. Desire admitted that he bought a See-n-Say-style toy for his little southpaw — not realizing that playing with it would require Nolan to execute a move like a cowboy roping a calf to pull a string on the right and make the toy moo like a cow.

Nolan was diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Dr. Desire worries when he thinks of what it might mean for his son. “I’m level-headed, and see that he’s making progress, but as a parent it’s never fast enough.

There is tremendous hope, but there is also fear for the future.”

Dr. Desire said he leans heavily on God and prayer in his life. “If I am faced with a crisis, I pray about it, because God is the one who guides me,” he said. “The steadiness helps me a lot.”

Dr. Desire and Dr. Ann have built their practice around the idea that taking the time to talk with patients is good medicine. “Most of our patients appreciate the time we spend with them,” he said. “The insurance company does not value it, but we do.”

Having a conversation with a patient, he said, is the best way to get to know the whole person, and get a sense of who they are and where they are going. “I’ve learned that many of my patients first came to the Island with their parents or their grandparents,” he said. “Now that they are older, they’ve inherited this place.”

Sometimes these conversations take an unexpected turn. Recently, a patient mentioned that his father had worked in banking at Manufacturer’s Hanover, a large company that was taken over by Chase years ago. As they talked, Dr. Desire realized he knew the young man’s father from his banking days, a friend he hadn’t seen in 20 years.

“My dad’s in the waiting room now,” the patient said, and an impromptu reunion ensued.

In contrast to his practice in Bellport, where Dr. Desire saw a fair number of tick bites, but only rarely with Lyme disease, on the Island many more of those with tick bites develop Lyme. Aside from the frequency of tick-born disease, Dr. Desire said the health issues he sees on the Island are similar to what he’s seen throughout his years of practice; lifestyle-related illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease.

“The goal is to use as little medicine as possible to get the effect you need,” he said.

Now in their third summer providing medical care on the Island, Dr. Desire said he and his wife are starting to get a feel for the rhythm of the place. This year, they closed their Bellport office, committing themselves to their practice here. Their Island office is open three days a week in the winter and five days a week in the summer.

09/16/2016

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO John Tehan aboard Tubby, his 34-foot trawler with a top speed of seven knots.

Published on August 11, 2016

When John Tehan moved to Shelter Island as a child, he was already anchored by four generations of his mother’s family, ties so strong they drew him back no matter how many times he got away.

A charter boat captain, fishing guide and bayman, John is as familiar with the waters of the Florida Keys as Gardiners Bay. He has lived in California, Arizona and Florida, but always seems to wash up on the Island he refers to as “Paradise.”

“A lot of people find comfort in mainstreaming their lives, but that only appeals to a segment of society,” he said. “Some of us do fine in a hurricane.”

When it comes to riding out a storm, John has a certain style. In early April, while traveling north in Tubby, his 34-foot Marine Trader, en route to Shelter Island from a winter sojourn at Marathon in the Florida Keys, he heard reports of a nor’easter between him and his destination. With Tubby safely tucked away in the cheapest slip in Atlantic City, he hopped on the casino bus and spent two days visiting seafood buffets.

“Everything worked out,” John said. “Lunch at a seafood buffet was $12, complete with raw bar and cracked lobster. I’d take a nap, get up, and do it again for two days. It was delightful.”

John was born in Washington, D.C., but his mother, Evyne House Tehan, had family living in Shelter Island Heights going back to the 1930s. In the early 1960s, John’s family started renting on Shelter Island in the summers.

“The second season we rented next door to the Hannabury’s, so my first friends on Shelter Island were Bill and his sister Cheryl,” John said.

In 1965, the Tehans moved to Shelter Island full-time and John and his brother, Chris, became the fifth generation to live here.

When John and Chris were in their teens, their parents split up, and their father moved to Arizona, where the boys went one Christmas to visit him.

“Back home it was cold and gray,” John recalled. “In Arizona, it was 80 degrees and sunny,”

John moved to Arizona not long after, eventually spending 15 years in the Southwest, gaining two ex-wives (who were roommates when he met them) and “two fabulous children, one with each wife” before he finally found his way back to the Island in 1991.

“When I was young, there was a tremendous drive for Shelter Island youth to get the hell out of here,” he said. “But when you see the rest of the world, you realize you’ve left paradise.”

Paradise was part of his decision to move back, but so was family. He said his relationship with his mother, and with brother Chris, was important to him, and so was his son, Michael. At the time, John’s first wife was increasingly worried about raising their son in Phoenix with its crime and drug problems.

“She said it might not be such a bad idea if Michael grows up on Shelter Island,” John said.

Michael embraced the Shelter Island lifestyle. Now 33, he works as a carpenter and lives in Cutchogue.

John has not remarried. “I stopped buying pretty women houses,” he said.

After 10 years working as a bartender for James and Linda Eklund, primarily at the Chequit, in 2001, John bought Tubby, a slow and reliable “meatloaf” of a boat, so recognizable that children on Shell Beach wave as John steers her past on his way out of West Neck Harbor. In 2006, he began taking groups out for half-day fishing trips and sunset cruises.

“She does not go fast,” he said, pointing out that her name fits her.

Today, John has a full-time charter-boat business, even captaining other people’s boats while they fish. Chris works for the town, a fact that stimulated a bit of sibling rivalry. “My brother is a building inspector,” said John. “So I have the better job.”

Judging by the way porgies were flying over the rails, during a recent half-day outing, John knows how to find fish. “I grew up fishing here,” he said. “Of course, everyone gives you the wrong advice, but I’m out here every day, I see where all the other charter boats are.”

On a trip a week or so ago, John described a young client who asked for help reeling in a large fish. Wanting her to have the satisfaction of landing it, he encouraged her to bring it in solo. He was aghast as she pulled a four-foot shark onto the boat with considerable effort.

“We took a picture of it and I apologized to her for not helping,” he said.

Tubby is perfect for bottom-fishing, and for most of John’s guests, it means returning dockside with a cooler full of black bass, porgies, shark and the rare blowfish, all of which John reduces to a mound of fillets in minutes.

“I had to explain to a 7-year old girl that there is a blowfish tax on Tubby,” John said, describing the subterfuge that was necessary to deliver fresh blowfish to his late mother, who doted on it. “The family of the 7-year-old got a whole cooler full of fish but I took the blowfish.”

Every October 1, John takes Tubby down to work the winter season in Florida, meeting other people on boats as he goes. “People who do this have eccentric lifestyles and tend to live interesting lives,” he said, describing the trip down as a vacation. “Thirty days on the water. Nothing but beautiful communities the whole way.”

On the first Monday in November, John can be found back on the Island, loading up his Midland 19 in the predawn cold and heading out to participate in an annual ritual he’s observed since his youth — opening day of scallop season. It’s a training exercise as well as a fishing one.

“For three weeks, I eat a pure protein diet — scallops and cigarettes. My cigarette to scallop ratio is about 10 to 1. And coffee, coffee, coffee. My purest joy is being out on the water to throw the dredges just at sunrise.”

When the East End weather starts to turn, John heads south. “Every time a snowflake hits my bald spot, I get an electric shock that goes all the way to my toes,” he said. “I sold my chainsaw and my log splitter.”

John summed up the changes on the Island in the years he’s lived here: “In the pastures where Anita Bartilucci kept cattle, there are houses now.”

He’s resigned to the inevitable development. “I’m very impressed with the quality of our Town Board and our local politicians,” he said. “They are real people, I can poke them in the ribs at the post office, I see them at the IGA.”

As he considered Shelter Island’s exceptionalism, Tubby passed through an area of reddish water. “I’m most worried about the density of the population negatively affecting the water in the Bay,” John said, noting the bloom of red tide.

“If I didn’t have people on my boat, I’d be digging ditches for a living, and I’d be a much less happy person,” John said. “We have to share paradise, we can’t keep it to ourselves.”

09/02/2016

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Bob Markell in his attic studio with a self-portrait, painted, he said, when he was angry with himself.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 2, 2016

When Bob Markell was 8 years old he got the measles, and was treated by a doctor who praised his young patient’s artistic ability. “He was just being nice, but I believed him,” Bob said.

From then on, he was determined to be a painter, but his father objected, “You are going to live in an attic, you are going to starve, and I’m not going to pay for it,” he was told.

More than eight decades later, Bob’s father’s predictions have come true except for the starving part. First came 50 years as a designer, producer and executive in television, five Emmys, and distinguished work such as art director for the film “12 Angry Men” in 1957, and the first televised production of “The Nutcracker.” Since the early 1990s, Bob has focused on fine art, and in August welcomed visitors to his well-lit attic studio filled with sketches and paintings during the ArtSI studio tour.

Bob was born in 1924 and raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts. His mother had emigrated from Russia, but his father’s family was “more Americanized,” and deeply cynical. “My father had a negative view,” Bob said. “He really didn’t believe that when people were nice to him they meant it.”

Bob went to Northeastern University and graduated in 1944 with a degree in civil engineering and some work experience at a Boston architecture firm. He and everyone he knew wanted to go fight Hitler, but asthma prevented him from combat; he ended up at Grumman Aircraft on Long Island doing stress analysis on airplanes. After World War II, Grumman began manufacturing canoes, but lacking the same enthusiasm for peacetime canoes he had for wartime airplanes, Bob left in hope of more creative work.

He and two roommates had been living in a house near Grumman when he found all of his belongings on the porch. The landlady declared she didn’t want foreigners (i.e. Bob, a Jew) in her home. So in 1946, Bob and his friends moved to New York City, and he decided to try his hand at set design.

His first experience was at a summer-stock theater in the Catskills, a bowling alley that had been converted to a theater, where he painted a set but failed to seal it with the adhesive known as “rabbit glue.” By the next day all the paint had run off, and someone said, “You didn’t forget to put the rabbit glue on, did you?”

“I didn’t forget,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

Bob met his wife, Joan Harris, in 1948 when she showed up as a volunteer stagehand for an Equity Library Theatre production in New York. Bob was the scenic designer. A Chicago native, Joan was a Northwestern University theater program graduate and moved to New York to pursue acting. When she didn’t get cast, she dressed the set.

“I said, ‘Listen, any of you guys know how to light a show?’” Bob said. “And she went up the ladder, and was hanging on, and I said, ‘Anyone who would climb up and hang lights for me is worth knowing.’” They married in 1949.

Bob and Joan have two children, Mariana Markell, a nephrologist at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and Denis Markell, a dramatist and novelist, whose latest book, a young adult novel called “Click Here to Start,” was published in July.

In 1966, Bob was a producer on the classic courtroom drama series, “The Defenders,” when he worked with Dustin Hoffman.

The young actor’s role was a New York accountant, and Bob told Hoffman — at the time considered too homely to play a leading man — that he’d have to cut his long hair for the part. Hoffman insisted that Bob be present during the haircut so Bob could listen to him scream (something about Samson and Delilah). “They gave him a really nice haircut and he looked great,” said Bob. “I think he got the job on “The Graduate” because of the haircut, so he kind of owed me.”

The day Bob got the assignment that would lead to his fifth Emmy, he almost blew it. He said he had been drinking when the call came from CBS higher-ups to come discuss a promotion and new assignment.

“I couldn’t get any ice cubes and I heard myself say, ‘I can’t come now, I’m waiting for my refrigerator to be fixed.’” He managed to make it to the meeting, was promoted to executive producer, and assigned to a project called “Bicentennial Minutes,” a series of hundreds of 60-second historical sketches that aired from 1974 through 1976.

CBS had undertaken “Bicentennial Minutes” as public service announcements; under Bob’s direction they were each tiny dramas with a beginning, middle and end. Norman Mailer, President Gerald Ford, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and First Lady Betty Ford were among the celebrities who participated, and in 1975 Bob received an Emmy as executive producer of the series.

When Tennessee Williams was asked to do a New Year’s Eve Bicentennial Minute, the hard-drinking writer insisted on writing his own script, but the script didn’t materialize and it came time to shoot. “He was so smashed you couldn’t believe it,” Bob said. “He just looked into the camera and said, ‘This is Tennessee Williams and I want to offer all of you a happy, happy New Year and a happy holiday!’ Someone asked me, ‘Who wrote this thing?’”

In 1960, Bob and Joan were living in Brooklyn Heights when friends suggested a visit to Shelter Island. They visited, bought a house on the Island, and in 1976 they moved into their current home on Midway Road, an antique beauty built by a whaler, Captain Samuel Sherman, in the early 19th century.

In October 1977, Dashiell Hammett’s “The Dain Curse,” starring James Coburn, with Bob as executive producer, became the first major motion picture to be filmed on Shelter Island.

Bob told The New York Times that the absence of traffic lights and antennas and the plentiful supply of photogenic Victorian homes was a factor in CBS’s decision to film here, but more important was the willingness of local people, such as Williette Piccozzi, Louis Cicero and then Supervisor Leonard Bliss to support the production as extras, with haircuts — Louis’ cut, short with sideburns, became known as “The Dain Cut” — and with their tolerance of the weeks-long disruption of Island life.From his first visits to Shelter Island, Bob felt his creative juices flow.

His friends here were members of the Shelter Island Community of Artists, including Gus Mosca, and Luiz Coelho, now gone.

“They were marvelous, and helped me more than anyone else,” Bob said. “I miss them terribly.”

In his painting, Bob tries to reveal the emotions in his subjects. “You have to feel something,” he said. “Every time I get angry at myself, I do a self-portrait. When I paint someone else, I’m very concerned about insulting them, so I don’t do portraits that well, but I love painting myself.”

Last Sunday afternoon four deer loitered by the screened porch of the house on Midway Road. A six-point buck sat regally in the grass, with two does standing nearby and between them a spotted fawn on long, gawky legs. A cottontail rabbit hopped nearby.

Even by Shelter Island standards, this was an extraordinary assemblage. Did these ruminants sense they were gathered under the gaze of a celebrated designer, and formed this bucolic tableau, hoping to catch the artist’s eye?